It’s that time of year. “Everyone’s back from India, and someone’s always
going, ‘Yaaah, yoga. I’m feeling soooo great.’” This is how one cranky
worker described her office vibe at the moment.
“It’s hilarious, such a middle-class form of escapism. I just wish they
wouldn’t be so smug about it.” I’ve just spent four weeks in India myself,
and I can see her point. As the writer Nirpal Dhaliwal says, “Everyone goes
there to work something out, don’t they?”
A British-born Indian, he has spent more than 12 months there in total since
his first trip without his family four years ago. “I needed to sort out my
Indian-ness. But in another sense, I was like a lot of westerners — I went
because it is a powerful place.”
The DJ Toni Tambourine was in Goa this Christmas, for the Sunburn music
festival. He was “curious to check out the culture”. At 38, he’s been to a
lot of the chillout hotspots in Asia, but “India was spiritual, like no
other holiday I’ve ever taken”.
Recent cultural blockbusters have seen India move into a new era of western
enthusiasm. Chiefly responsible: Aravind Adiga’s Man Booker prize-winning
The White Tiger; the epic gangland bestseller Shantaram (which Johnny Depp
loved so much he persuaded Warner Bros to pay the author, Gregory David
Roberts, $2m for the film rights); and the “feelgood film of the decade”,
Slumdog Millionaire, nominated in 10 Oscar categories.
One in six of the 5m people who visit India as tourists every year are
British, many of whom, but not all, go with some existential purpose. From
the skint backpacker paying 500 rupees a week for yoga on the beach, to the
upmarket clients of Palanquin Traveller, a company that offers a two-week
“spiritual journey in north India” at £200 a day, all sorts head there to
soak up the magic, not just the middle class.
I met a working-class northern guy who claims India stopped him from joining
his drinker/junkie friends on the streets; Julien Macdonald was also in
evidence. It’s funny to think this red-carpet stalwart feels at home in a
place where it’s common to see someone voiding their bowels at the side of
the road. Sad as it is, the realism of daily life in India is an essential
backdrop for the reality check so many westerners seek.
Simon Beaufoy has spent many months in India since starting the script for
Slumdog Millionaire. He can’t believe how much the country had changed since
he went there 20 years ago, aged 18, “when I came with a dream to climb in
the Himalayas — which had to remain a fantasy, as I spent most of the trip
crippled with illness in the dust of New Delhi. As a foreigner, you’ll never
quite find the thing you’re looking for there. If you do, you’re being
spoon-fed a heritage — and not the real thing at all”.
One guy I met described his dream for his first trip as “looking for the
mountains-and-solitude side of India. I’m looking for the guru who lives in
a cave and has renounced the world”. And it’s a nice idea. Until he arrives
and realises there are a billion people and hurdles to clear in order to get
there. The west has always been prone to Indomania. From the Beatles to
Schopenhauer, poets, philosophers, writers, musicians and artists have
lauded the nation as a source of inspiration and wisdom.
Whenever you see hot pink or harem pants on the catwalk, you can bet your last
organic beanburger it’s because the designer just “did India”. Parents who
hit the hippie trail urge their kids to follow in their footsteps. Despite
other exotic borders opening, India still tops the backpackers’ destination
list, according to the student travel agency STA.
But back to our Indiaaaaaah crew. It is not the entrepreneurship, the mad
cities, the promise in the slums or even the ancient civilisation that
thrills the wannabe chic yogi, her flesh-revealing Melissa Odabash kaftan
packed neatly in her bag (inappropriate attire for anywhere but the most
westernised beaches).
The truth is that those looking for the healing “Indian experience” are often
so focused on themselves, stuffed away in their retreats, that the only
thing they really see are cool things for the flat when they go to some
market.
Dhaliwal quotes Salman Rushdie: “The west repeats itself in India as a farce”,
then adds his own corollary: “India repeats itself in westerners as tragedy.
When a westerner takes on the garb of the Indian in their yoga and chanting,
it’s always a sign of inner pain.” In some parts of India, you are more
likely to find western yoga teachers than Indian ones. “The Indian teachers
lack sympathy, they make the spiritual journey so much less palatable for
the tourist on their ‘spiritual journey’,” the yoga instructor Charles
Cartmell says.
He describes a type of British woman “used to the form of aerobics with a
‘spiritual’ price tag that has been commonly sold as yoga in the west. You
don’t have to be able to stick your toe in your ear to be spiritual;
frankly, the process of getting Delhi belly will take you to a more
interesting edge in yourself”.
At the supposedly ascetic ashram level, savvy Indian gurus have become wise to
the tastes of the western spiritual thrill-seeker. Osho — the “Gucci guru” —
opened an ashram in Pune popular with a western audience in thrall to one
aspect of his teachings: free love. The guesthouse there is more like a
minimalist boutique hotel.
The Beatles famously fell in love with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi after he met
them in London and gave them a personal mantra. After a bit of a downer year
in 1967, the band went to find themselves by learning transcendental
meditation at the Maharishi’s ashram in Rishikesh — and left after a
falling-out with their one-time idol. The guru claims it was due to their
drug-taking at the ashram; others said the guru was having it away with Mia
Farrow.
Drugs are often part of the picture. India has many of the key stops on the
international stoner circuit. I remember friends who gap-yeared in India
coming back with fantastic tales revolving around bhang lassis and smoking
opium in Varanasi. The Delhi-based writer Ambika Muttoo says Indians are
well aware of the “so-called ‘spiritual seekers’ who take drugs to ‘find
themselves’.
If you want to do the drugs, do them. But don’t kid yourself by dressing it
up”. In Goa, I overheard a late twentysomething, who had come to India to
“get it together” before she switched careers, banging on about her
spiritual journey while she drank vodka and mango juice and hoovered up
various other substances at a private party. A friend rounded on her: “Oh
come on, get real! You’ve been off your head for the past three months.”
Cartmell is familiar with the spiritual-narco tourist. “In Varanasi, Pune or
Rishikesh, where people go to find good teachers and ashrams, you’ll find
plenty who have no discipline, who can’t touch their toes, lying around
smoking pot and talking about the blossoming of their heart chakras.” As
Adiga comments in The White Tiger: “Foreigners get into weird poses, smoke
hashish, shag a sadhu or two, and think they’re getting enlightened . . .
Ha!”
Still, I’ve never heard of anyone who went to India to find themselves asking
for their money back. However it works, it does. Shantaram author Gregory
David Roberts says that anyone, no matter how self-obsessed, who intends to
make “a journey within when they visit India, cannot fail to receive some
spiritual result. That is down to one thing: the people. Everywhere you go
you are confronted with the most wretched of the earth . . . and, for want
of a better word, the Indian niceness, which comes from deep in their
heart”.
Let’s not pretend India is being laid to waste by tragic British princesses
wielding issues and yoga mats. There are also hordes of
post-national-service Israelis in the backpacker havens of the Himalayas,
Rajasthan and the beaches of the south; and the locals are muttering about
how rude and stoned they are. And the Russians appear to have taken over the
whole of north Goa.
At the SwaSwara wellness resort, near the holy town of Gokarna, in Karnataka,
the manager, Anjali Tolani, caters for a mixed bag of middle-aged
continental Europeans who want yoga lifestyle the easy way. She runs a sort
of £200-a-night ashram with light traditional foods and a little wine if
your in-house ayurvedic doctor agrees to it. She also describes a type of
aspirational and wealthy Indian guest who is “pleased and proud to see
westerners enjoying our ancient traditions. They’re thinking, ‘Well, if it’s
good enough for them . . . ’ But then back in the rooms, they’ll be calling
for deep-fried pakoras and whisky”.
So which is the India the west most desires — the cinematic slums of Slumdog,
the mafia world of Shantaram, the designer-kaftan havens of Goa or the
pauper’s triumph of The White Tiger? Is it pleasing to be reminded of how
fortunate we are, despite the recession and rain? As Beaufoy says, “It’s
capitalism on steroids out there, they are moving so fast into the future.
One thing's for sure: they aren’t looking to us for anything.”
